Thus Always
by Beabaseball
Summary: When Riku reached out his hand, Sora took it, and drowned in the darkness with him. - canon divergence, minor violence
1. Help

**warnings for injury description and maleficent/ canon rewrite/ send help this is not who I want to be**

"Come with me," Riku said, arm extended and palm up. The ocean behind him rose, slowly, horribly, into a wave. The sort of wave Sora saw only in his nightmares and in nature documentaries. There were sirens all around the island that were tested monthly, and he could not tell if the wailing in his ears was his own terror or those same sirens in the distance. The wave rumbled as it rose, speeding towards them and growing ever-taller as the waters around the pier retreated, leaving it standing on only sand. The darkness grew thicker around them, swimming around Riku's feet, tugging at Sora's ankles, and Riku said again, " _Come with me._ "

"I'm trying!" Sora shouted, struggling against the tendrils that wrapped around his ankles and speaking over the ever-growing rumble of the ocean. His eyes darted between Riku, his hand, and the wave behind them. Fourty feet. Fifty. Sixty. "Riku, please, we have to go! Where's Kairi? _Riku_ —!"

Riku stood still, watching Sora with his arm extended but not making any move to come closer to help Sora reach him. He didn't even seem aware of the wave or that Kairi wasn't present, something which struck even more cold terror into Sora's chest. "Don't fear the darkness, Sora."

"What are you talking about?" Sora managed to take one struggling step closer to Riku, gasping for breath at the exertion the simple feat took him. The shadows dug nails into his shins and he cried out. "Riku, we need to run! Where's Kairi? Is she safe?"

"If you don't come, then—" Riku began, but—

"—I'm _trying_ , you asshole!" Sora shouted, louder than before, rage and terror overcoming him as the shadows crawled up his legs and the wave reached a hundred feet, about to break! "I'm not leaving either of you, so _help me_!"

Riku blinked. And took Sora's hand.

000

Sora hadn't ever really wanted to leave the island. Not permanently. Not like Riku had.

Riku wanted to go to a mainland university and get a degree in aeronautics, but sometimes that seemed like more of a pipe dream than even going to other worlds on a homemade raft.

What Kairi wanted, he wasn't sure exactly, but he knew the place it began was curiosity about her first home, about her biological family. It was a curiosity he was sure a bunch of adopted kids shared, regardless of how much they loved their adopted family. A little curiosity didn't negate love, but it was hard to satisfy that curiosity without at least a little investigation. That's the impression he'd gotten, anyway.

Sora personally thought of other worlds the same way he would think of a vacation spot: places to visit, but not to stay. Places to admire, but not call his own. He liked to think he would walk through other worlds with the courtesy tourists rarely showed on their islands, one of the many reasons their families had pitched in to make a play-island that was off-limits to non-locals. Somewhere their children could go without fear of being photographed or followed by strangers.

One day, he would outgrow the play island. He would buy a bigger boat, and he would be a fisherman like his parents, and have children in the same house he had grown up in, and watch his own children go off to the play island, any maybe by the time they outgrew the play island the main island would be a better place than it had been while Sora grew up.

He was okay with that. It would be okay if he only saw other places just once. Met new people on his own terms. See what else was out there. Then, he would be content with what was simply his. But he did want to see. He did want to know. He could be content, but he _did_ want to have that chance—

He did not think that his journey to other worlds would begin with slamming down face-first on a stone walkway, the snap of ribs breaking, his and Riku's hands clenched tightly around each other's wrists.

"Augh!" Sora started, crying out in shock, before it turned into a wail of misery and pain, his free hand clutching at his side and growing more frantic when he touched something wet and hot.

Riku didn't let go of his wrist, and Sora gripped back even tighter than before as Riku scrambled to crouch beside him, eyes wide and making quiet sounds Sora couldn't even hear over his own agony.

Through the haze of pain and oncoming tears, Sora realized that Riku was unharmed. Even after that landing, he seemed fine, without claw marks up his legs or ripping open his stomach. That's as much observation as he got in before Riku finally raised his voice loud enough to be heard and shouted," _Hey! Is there anyone out there? We need a hospital!"_

He let go of Sora's hand—before any protest could be made, the hand was placed over the gash on Sora's side, pressing it closed with both palms while Sora's hand clung stubbornly to his friend's wrist.

Sora didn't think there was anyone else around, but Riku kept calling, anyway. His face was pressed against the ground, so despite the rush of blood through his ears, he assumed he would be able to hear anyone approaching. He couldn't hear anything beside his beating hearts and Riku's shouts, until suddenly, he did.

[Oh my.]

He opened his eyes, squinting, trying to make out the figure in front of him, but all he could see was darkness. Riku stopped shouting.

[What have we here? Two guests instead of one?]

"Hey, lady!" Riku's voice cut through again. "He needs a doctor, or something. Are you gonna get help or just—?"

His voice broke off far too quickly and with a flash of green. Sora groaned and closed his eyes again, unable to handle the light. The afterimage was already burnt into his eyelids.

[Patience, child. He will be well. I have something far better than any physician.]

Riku croaked something. It was hard to make out, but sounded like a 'what?'. His hand found its place again around Sora's wrist just as something cold and slimy slid under Sora's shirt and settled against the wound on his stomach. He jerked and let out a small cry, though the sensation wasn't painful. It tingled. It tingled so much that the pain faded beneath the new sensation, and then, there wasn't any pain at all.

Slowly, Sora opened his eyes, finally clear from any tears. He looked around with some semblance of clarity for the first time, but what he saw made him question if he truly was seeing anything properly.

They were on a stone platform, surrounded by blue, floating chunks of rock. Gravity seemed to have gotten confused about this place. The stone platform was in a depression, one surrounded by waterfalls which flowed upwards instead of down. The sky was an overcast gray, and the air was bitter cold.

Riku knelt beside him, blanched and wide-eyed, but unharmed. Looking down at his own stomach, a new scar had appeared on him. A much larger, uglier scar than any he'd ever gotten scraping himself on the pier or getting bitten by animals. Pink and fleshy, as if freshly healed, tracing out three long claw marks over the top of his stomach. Though he could still feel the cold, slimy sensation, nothing visible was there, but the blood that had been moments before pouring out of him.

He swallowed the lump in his throat, and turned to look with Riku at the person who had saved him.

They were tall and gaunt, with green skin, the same sort of color their school had painted the person chosen to play the witch in last year's play.

Jagged, curling horns grew out of their head. A jade scepter was clasped tightly in one hand, and the other was wrapped in shadows and something glimmering faintly. Their robe was black and purple, and seemed to fade into the stone platform more than lay on it.

"Uh," Sora said, momentarily speechless in the face of—everything. "Uh, thank you, I, um. What. What was that?"

The person smiled, looking over both Sora and Riku as they shuffled back onto their feet, Sora leaning heavily on his older friend.

[Why, dear child,] the person said, [it was magic.]


	2. The Castle of Hollow Bastion

Maleficent's castle was like nothing Riku had ever seen before. Like nothing he could have imagined when he'd first heard the whispers coming from that wooden door at the back of the cave.

He knew of castles. He understood the word and concept of castles. His history books had mentions of them as places where treaties were signed and, just in general, Riku could comprehend castles; it wasn't that hard. He just had never really cared until he was trailing behind a sorceress, half-carrying his best friend, inside of a goddamn castle.

For all he knew about castles, he had never actually expected one to be so big.

Riku had spent most of his life outside on the shore, watching the ocean. The ocean, for its part, stretched as far as he could see. It surrounded everything, swallowed everything, and even where there wasn't water, the sound and smell of it dominated the land. Even then, he could not accurately explain the fathomless depths of the ocean. Humans had explored more of the sky above them than the ocean's depths—going to another world on a raft? Was genuinely more likely than exploring any significant amount of ocean.

With so much of their world made up of ocean, their livable world was hideously small. The Destiny Island chain was a smattering of sand with a pebble of a main island. Their two highschools had barely a thousand students each. Riku's home island was half the size of the main island. The play island was navigable in under fifteen minutes, on foot. He measured things on foot because he had never been in a car or used any vehicle for transportation but a boat, not even a cart or bike, because there was simply no need. He hardly even needed to use a boat, for now that he was fifteen, he was a good enough swimmer that if necessary he could have swum to school each day.

There wasn't an inch of the Destiny Islands Riku didn't know. He'd traveled through the northern markets, made faces at tourists on the main island, snuck over the government fencing on the western coast and been politely escorted back out of the facility by soft-faced guards when he was caught. The play island's cave, their secret spot, was covered almost entirely in etchings, not a free space of rock left after years and years of retreading the same old stones.

The castle was—so, so different, that for a while, Riku wasn't able to wrap his head around it. Everything felt like it was covered in a thin layer of fog as Maleficent wrapped them in green magic and teleported them (teleported them!) over the rising falls and into the inner chamber of the castle of Hollow Bastion.

Both doors to the room were tall and wooden. Easily ten times Riku's height, and more than five times as wide. They'd been teleported into a circular room made out of marble and garnet, with opals on the door knobs and a high domed ceiling with a shimmering chandelier at least the size of a large fishing boat.

They stood on top of a grand staircase, above a freely-flowing fountain and before one of the two sets of massive wooden doors within the chamber.

Sora leaned heavily against him, looking around the room in blatant awe—the sort of awe Riku was trying very hard to keep contained. He'd been told time and again that it wasn't good to look like you were unused to success, so—the same probably applied to stepping inside a sorceresses castle, right? If not, Sora looked shocked enough to count for both of them, surely. One of them would be right, so they would be fine.

Thought the open wound on Sora's side was fully healed, the younger boy was still unsteady on his feet. Whatever spell Maleficent had used on him—'whatever spell,' he had never thought the day would come when he had that sort of thought legitimately—it hadn't soothed the shock of suddenly being grievously injured, and it probably hadn't replenished the blood that was still staining the floating stone platform they'd landed on. Therefore, eager as he was to explore the castle and figure out exactly what was going on, Riku was going to find somewhere for Sora to lie down and he was going to do it as quickly as possible.

Fortunately, Maleficent seemed to have the same idea.

With a wave of her green and long-fingered hand, she opened the wooden doors behind them and gestured for them to enter the new chamber.

[The lifts,] she said. [will take you to your chambers. Lay your friend to rest. Then, return to me.]

Riku nodded, hoping he looked more confident than he felt while he adjusted his grip on Sora and they shuffled into the lift shop. Immediately as he did, the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck rose to attention.

The entire room was a giant, free circuit. Probably about the size of his homeroom classroom back on Destiny Islands, the lift shop was a circular… pit? A cylinder of a room that stretched towards the sky and ground for as far as he could look in either direction. Electricity ran freely between various suspended platforms. Or was it magic that looked like electricity?

He didn't dare ask, but the whole area glowed blue with power, and he wasted precious moments glancing around, trying to figure out where to go and what to touch without giving either himself or Sora a nasty shock.

"Uh," Sora said after a moment. He lifted the hand that wasn't slung around Riku's shoulders, pointing to a small circular platform suspended midair a few feet from the edge of the platform connected to the massive wooden doors. "Maybe there?"

Riku nodded and lead the way, still taking most of Sora's weight. He inspected the platform once they were a bit closer. A massive opal was inlaid in the center of the platform, and the electric blue magic raced in the gap separating them from it.

Swallowing whatever doubt that was clogging his throat, Riku was about to ask whether Sora was well enough to jump onto the platform (it wasmagic, surely their weight would hold) when Maleficent's voice stalled him.

[Touch the crystal by the wall. If you have any power within you, it will react.]

Riku glanced back to see the sorceress standing just outside in the marbled room, watching them through the doorframe. He looked away quickly, the silent challenge ringing clear in his mind as he found the crystal she meant. It was blue, hovering at waist height near the edge of the platform, nearly blending in with the lightshow around it. No wonder he hadn't noticed it at first.

Still. He'd have to be more observant in the future. Just because this was a new world didn't mean—

—it didn't mean shit. If he was going to explore, he was going to explore. He was certainly not powerless to do that.

He wrapped a hand around the small blue crystal, cautious to see if it would move or twist, or if he'd have to do something weird like chant or meditate to get it to reveal itself.

The crystal did not move. Did not spin or twist or give in when he tried to pull it from its spot. Nothing seemed to happen with his touch, and he was tempted to mutter something under his breath just in case, when he realized the crystal had somehow slipped from his grasp and left him standing on a different platform than the one they'd just been on.

Their new platform—the circular, opal-inlaid one he'd been considering jumping onto—began to rise into the air. Sora let out a gargled gasp of surprise, while Riku bit his lip to keep from doing the same, instinctively bending his knees and keeping his stance wide, as if he were on a rocking boat.

Good, Maleficent's voice came floating from somewhere hard to define. Riku's eyes darted around, looking for the source, but the wooden doors had closed and the sorceress was nowhere to be seen as the platform rose higher and higher into the air. [Very good. When you're ready, return on the lifts. There is much to be discussed, Bringer of Darkness.]

The platform rose higher and higher into the air, until Riku lost sight of the lift shop entirely.

000

The room the lift brought them to was still twice, even three times, the size of Riku's room back on the islands.

He was starting to get dizzy just trying to imagine how much more space was in the castle, let alone this whole world.

Sora first, though.

"How are you feeling?" Riku asked, leading him past a carved wooden wardrobe and gold-engraved table and chairs, towards a large canopy bed covered in pillows and white sheets, with sheer, pale curtains draped about it.

"Better," Sora said. "Still kinda dizzy, I guess."

"Do you think you can stand on your own?" With one hand, he pulled the curtains aside so Sora could actually sit on the bed, but regretted asking his question when he saw Sora's expression out of the corner of his eye and realized what he'd written off as a pained grimace was Sora trying to repress a grin. "You lazy bum! Have you been fine this whole time?"

"You don't let me lean all over you very often!" Sora said, a whine in his voice, finally letting the shit eating grin appear all over his face. He gave an oof when Riku shoved him onto the bed and quickly resumed scowling. "Jerk."

"You almost go and start bleeding out on the front step of the first world we go to, and I'm the jerk?" Riku said, throwing up a hand.

"Yes! I just told you I was still dizzy and what do you do? Knock me over." Sora straightened up as he spoke. True, he was moving a bit slower than normal and taking care as he adjusted his seat on the edge of the bed, but still moving much better than anyone who had just been torn open rightly should have been moving. "So it really worked? Whatever that was?"

Riku sighed and sat down a little ways away from the other boy on the edge of the bed. He ignored how Sora immediately began to shuffle closer, mussing the bed sheets. "Yeah. We really made it."

Sora looked up at him, then back around the room. Riku took another deep breath, and continued to do so, moderating his breathing and loosening his tense muscles. As much of a jerk move as it was, pretending to be more injured than he truly was, he was glad Sora was okay, and that knowledge let him relax for the first time since he'd set foot on the beach that night. He closed his eyes and leaned back.

"Riku?" Sora said. "Where's Kairi?"

The tension snapped back, all the worse for the moment of reprieve.

"Fuck," Riku said, turning sharply to look at his friend. "Did you see her anywhere?"

Sora's eyes narrowed. That was definitely not a good sign. "I was trying to ask you if you'd seen her, but you were too busy being all—weird."

"Maybe she was at her house," Riku said. "She'd be safe there. Right?"

Sora shook his head. "She was on the island. I definitely saw her! She was in the cave, but she was acting weird too, and then when she came towards me she vanished?"

He paused and looked down at his hands before pinching himself in the thigh until the skin lost some color.

"Uh," Riku said, "What are you doing?"

"You wake up from dreams by pinching yourself," Sora explained, face puffing up as he moved to pinch his cheek as well. "And this is all starting to sound a lot like a dream."

Riku couldn't really argue with that.

While Sora was busy trying to wake himself up from what Riku was pretty sure was reality, he thought back to… had it only been a few minutes before?

That thought felt faker than anything he'd seen in the castle. Had they really only been in another world for a few minutes?

They must've been gone for half an hour at most. He closed his eyes again, furrowing his brow and trying hard to think back on what had happened on the beach. Though it was so recent, he found it difficult to call up the memories. It was mostly a blur—waking in the night, going to the island to admire their raft once more before they set out in the morning. It had been nervous energy that drove him to the island at first, the desire to make sure that everything was as ready as they ever could be.

It had been nervous energy which drove him to the island, but it had been the nagging feeling of being watched that sent Riku to the secret spot.

After that, he wasn't entirely sure what had happened. He knew he'd tugged on the doorknob in the back of the cave, as everyone had at one point or another, but this time the door had budged, and…

He knew he'd seen Sora and called out to him, but the details of the conversation escaped him.

"I didn't see Kairi," Riku said, opening his eyes again and turning to find Sora had finally stopped pinching himself and was paying attention once again. "I went to check on the raft, but I was the only one on the island. That was around one in the morning, I think."

Sora nodded. "That sounds like about the time the storm woke me up, too."

"Storm?" Riku said.

Sora stared at him.

"Yeah," he said. "The massive storm that almost drowned us? We were almost killed?"

Riku stood abruptly. The bed didn't creak as he left it, his back to Sora and something cold like fear running down his back. "I'm gonna go talk to Maleficent. Maybe she knows what's going on. You stay and rest. You say you're fine, but just to be safe. Hang out here for a while."

He didn't look at Sora, but he could still hear the uncertainty in the, 'okay,' he was given. "And ask her if she knows anything about Kairi."

Riku nodded and left the room without a backwards glance.

000

 **a/n**

 **I was like "nothing happens in this chapter I can't post it it's a buffer chapter"**  
 **and then I whacked myself upside the head because I've been stressing myself out about chocking in as much as I physically can into horribly long epics of chapters and this fanfic is just me cutting loose and destroying everything in my wake**

 **thoughts appreciated; thank you for reading**


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